Thin Air Page 0,88

recognition bells, I knew that, but...nothing. A frustrating lack of context. "You know who I am?"

He licked pale lips and wiped away his tears with shaking hands. "You're gone," he said. "I killed you. I killed both of you."

He lunged at me, and slammed the heel of his hand into my shoulder. He seemed as surprised as I was-apparently, he'd been expecting a ghost, not flesh and blood. And I hadn't expected him to move quite that fast. "Whoa!" I said, and skipped back out of reach. "Watch the hands!"

Ashan didn't exactly look well. He was wearing some kind of a gray suit, but it was dirty, smudged, and torn, and he smelled. I mean, really smelled. His hair was greasy, and all in all, he looked like somebody who'd never discovered the basics of hygiene. Which I suppose would follow, if he'd been busted from near-angelic status to the merely human. Venna clearly hadn't taken the time to clean him up, or maybe she hadn't been able to convince him to even try.

He kept looking at me like he wasn't sure he was sane. Well...actually, he looked like he'd blown past the borders of actual sanity some time ago. I glanced over my shoulder. Venna was still there, watching with unnervingly bright eyes.

"You have to be dead," he said. "I watched you die. I felt you die. And I paid the price."

"Sorry to disappoint you," I said. "Guess what? Good news. You get to make amends and help me get my life back."

He was fast. Faster than he ought to have been, and I hadn't moved far enough. He crossed the space, grabbed me by the throat, and slammed me down to the floor with such violence that I could barely comprehend it, much less react.

Upside down, Venna's face was still inscrutable. Great. No help from that quarter.

My instincts reached for power...and failed.

There was no access to the powers I'd started to get accustomed to, not here. This was like a bubble, cut off from the outside. Cut off from the aetheric.

"Get off!" I squeaked, and twisted, trying to throw Ashan's weight to one side. He wasn't heavy, but he was wiry, and he had an unholy amount of strength. I had no leverage. I grabbed a handful of his greasy hair and yanked, and he howled and used his free hand to grab my wrist. I bucked, got him off balance, and we rolled down the aisle of the chapel, spitting curses, and this time I ended up on top, my hands on his throat. Holding him down.

"Go on," he spat at me. "Break my neck. Kill me like I killed your child. Put me out of my misery, you pathetic bag of meat!"

I went very still. I must have looked like a crazy woman, my hair sticking to my sweaty face, my eyes wide, my lips parted on a truth I didn't want to speak.

He'd killed my child.

That was what Venna hadn't wanted to tell me. I was facing Imara's murderer, with his life in my hands.

This time, Venna did react. She stepped forward and said, very quietly, "You can't. You can't kill him."

Oh, I was pretty sure I could. And should.

Didn't the daughter I couldn't remember, whose pain had soaked into the very stones outside of this place, demand that much?

Chapter Thirteen

TWELVE

It wasn't so much the moral quandary that stopped me as the fact that something changed in the room, right at that moment. Not Ashan-he was a stinky, horrifying excuse for a human being, and right at that moment I had no reason in the world not to hurt him as badly as he'd hurt my daughter. I didn't figure that Venna would really be able to stop me.

What changed was that the three of us were no longer alone.

Venna took in a deep, gasping breath-more reaction than I'd ever heard from her-and moved slowly back, until her shoulders fetched up against the polished wood of the side of a pew.

And then she slipped down to her knees, put her hands in her lap, and bowed her head.

"Oh," she said faintly. "I see now. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought them here."

And there was someone sitting in the blackest shadows of the room, an outline of a person, nothing more, but a sense of presence and power sent little shocks up and down my spine.

I hesitated, staring at that dark shape, and then I sat up, grabbed Ashan by his filthy collar, and yanked